Canadian designer James White has created some very cool "unofficial" NASA patches for their newest missions. MAVEN, which stands for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, is set to launch in 2013. It will explore the planet’s upper atmosphere, ionosphere and interactions with the sun and solar wind.

The second is for the recently launched JUNO mission to Jupiter. Its primary scientific goal is to significantly improve our understanding of the formation, evolution and structure of that planet.

Who hasn't dreamt about working for NASA? As White states, "Whenever someone asks me what my 'dream job' would be, I almost always say 'I’d love to work with NASA.' I was never too specific about it, just touching on that I feel space exploration and the advancement of science is important and it’s something I’d like to help through visuals. When I was a kid in the 1980s we were still very much engrossed in everything to do with space shuttles, the moon, SkyLab and whatever else. I was a space kid, and still am.

"Over the last few years I’ve messed around with doing a NASA poster on my own time, but I never felt posters were really the hook. Just not very applicable to what NASA might need. But mission patches … there’s something I’d love to do. Something simple and iconic, embroidered on a jumpsuit. Now that’s cool. So I dug up some inspiration from my childhood and got to it."